Books |
Norman Mailer
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Fiction
It was the Spring of 1967, a Saturday night in Harvard Square, and Norman Mailer was exceedingly happy. And as Mailer drove his ancient Citroen station wagon to a party at one of Cambridge’s Brattle Street mansions, so was this writer, the 21-year-old in the back seat.
I was telling Mailer about my girlfriend’s family, especially her long-ago ancestor, Simon Cameron — the notoriously corrupt Secretary of War for Abraham Lincoln and the originator of the ever-timely truth, "An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.”
“Kornbluth, you are a jeweler,” Mailer said, “and a jeweler always gives me his jewel.”
Actually, I was the managing editor of The Harvard Advocate, the college’s venerable (and perpetually broke) literary magazine. For weeks, I had papered Cambridge with posters announcing a reading by the novelist — he had not yet marched on the Pentagon and written any non-fiction books — and the attendance turned out to be over-the-moon spectacular. Even after paying Mailer, the magazine would clean up.
Then Mailer had a jewel for me: The magazine could keep his fee.
Happiness was now exponential. The writer who was “between” books had attracted his largest-ever audience of young readers. And the young English major who idolized Mailer sensed he’d have more than one night to go to school on him in the hope of becoming Norman the Second.
And, for a year, Mailer and I had a smallish relationship. Until Graduation Day. There was a party afterward, and Mailer showed up. We hugged. And then my mother rushed over.
“Norman Mailer!” She grabbed him and kissed him. “I can’t tell you what your friendship has meant to Jesse.”
“If I burned down a supermarket,” Mailer once wrote, “my mother would have said, ‘They must have done something to annoy Norman.’” I had read just about every word Mailer wrote, but not those. So I didn’t realize that Mailer’s mother was as effusive as mine — and even more protective of her son than my doting mother. I just thought: Please, God, make me invisible.
My misplaced sense of shame kept me from seeing Mailer for the next 15 years. Today, I bless my mother. Mailer was a lush oak; you could plant your seed under his branches, but nothing grew to maturity there. Young writers who didn’t grasp that imitated him and wrote themselves into a corner; out in my personal Gulag, with no mentor to influence me, I blackened enough pages in my own fumbling style to eventually have a style.
In the interim, Mailer became a brand. Genuine anger had turned into philosophical shtick and pseudo-hipster doubletalk; the lust for literary immortality seemed to have morphed into a father’s concern for supporting nine children. He was a chameleon, and, whatever the task, he did it with seeming ease — including his transformation from Brooklyn swinger to Park Avenue pussycat. When next we met, it was at a black tie dinner in the early ’80s. “On nights like this,” Mailer told the woman who would be my first wife, “Jesse and I will always be the two poorest guys in the room.”
Odd what you remember. With some friends, it’s places, conversational topics, shared intimacy. With Noman Mailer, it’s sentences. But then, it’s not a small ability to speak in aphorisms, with the punctuation neatly in place and no “uhs” or pauses. He had the same quality in his writing. I haven’t read Advertisements for Myself in more than half a century, but I know I’m quoting him exactly: “The shits are killing us, even as they kill themselves.” And how many times have I consoled myself with this: “To humiliate a good writer is to give him an ax.” Or this: "You don’t really know a woman until you meet her in court."
Gore Vidal said that you should never pass up an opportunity to have sex or be on TV. Norman Mailer didn’t. That’s why I have a feeling he’ll be remembered as the first writer since Hemingway in America and Dickens in England to be a mass-market celebrity — a brawler ready to take on all comers. I recently sat with an indisputably great writer of Mailer’s generation and listened, rapt, as he considered which of his contemporaries might be read after his death. The list was short. Mailer was not on it.
He was probably right. Few are going to wade through the 700 pages of The Naked and the Dead, the World War II novel that made Mailer famous at 25. Nobody’s going to discover the flashes of brilliance in The Deer Park, his Hollywood novel. Increasingly, readers will come to embrace what is, soon after his death, the clichéd assessment of his career: The guy who set out to be a great novelist will be remembered for his addictively readable non-fiction chronicle, The Executioner’s Song, and his anti-war adventure, The Armies of the Night.
I’m not looking to bronze Norman Mailer. He wrote some second-rate books. He had some ridiculous ideas. He helped a killer get out of jail, only to see him, just six weeks later, kill again. He participated in a cocaine-smuggling enterprise that almost surely involved him more than he testified under oath. And for a writer obsessed with women, he was no particular friend to them.
But he had guts. He kicked the bad guys when they were on top, a kind of courage that Important Writers seem to have lost. He could write a killer sentence and, on a dime, spin an outrageous yarn. He had big dreams. He took wild chances. And he was kind — so very kind — to lost boys.
— Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com.
To buy "The Executioner’s Song" from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy "The Armies of the Night" from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy "Advertisements for Myself" from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy "The Naked and the Dead" from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy "The Deer Park" from Amazon.com, click here.
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An Irish Sparkle in His Jewish Eyes
Give Norman Mailer huge credit for this: he was not afraid of much, including his impulse to point out the murderous impact of fear on the lives of so many American men. As he said in conversation with his son John Buffalo in The Big Empty: “…we are obliged to go beyond ourselves, to transcend ourselves, if we are to rise so high as courage itself. That’s why I say timidity kills. Kills more people than bravery because every time one’s timid, one’s pulling back creative impulses, denying them. One is denting one’s ego. And as an ego contracts out of shame, illness begins. That is my opinion.”
Mailer himself did not accept the role the world wanted him to play, the role he was born to play. He wanted something larger. He wanted to be at the center of the American psyche, at the center of American life in ways that proved to be no longer possible for a novelist. Yet Norman Mailer — to use one of the many big words he used so fearlessly — existentially created himself as he wished to be. He was raised a brilliant Jewish child of Brooklyn, destined for Harvard. But he did not wish to become a nice Jewish boy or a great Jewish writer. Instead, he became a great American writer.
Mailer became a towering, complex, public figure, a man whose many ironies were, as he once observed, often misunderstood. But Mailer was famous, after all. And if you are famous, you run the risk of being caricatured and vilified by lesser minds, lesser pens. The worst thing about being a celebrity, Jonathan Miller once observed, is that you find out what everyone thinks of you. Mailer found out, but he endured, and, of course, the many books stand ready to be read and re-read. And the books contain sentences as rich, bold — and yes, subtle — as any written by an American in the 20th Century.
He trained himself to trust his instincts — and those instincts proved impressive. Start with fame. Mailer was a creature of the last half of the 20th Century, and as is often pointed out, he was famous for almost all of his adult life. He sometimes lamented that this rendered him unable to experience the world anonymously, as most of us do. But he embraced his fame, characteristically pushed it further and further until it became one of his great subjects — before it became one of our great subjects. Because ours is an era besotted by fame, of course, and we daily witness its corrosive effect on the famous and their followers. See the prophetic essays in "Advertisements for Myself" or "Existential Errands", the former being a title that summarizes our age nicely. Or for sheer nasty fun, see Mailer’s brief and brutal account of his meeting with Madonna in a back issue of Esquire magazine. The entertainer’s New York apartment, Mailer observed, brought to mind the palace of a petty dictator.
Take violence. Mailer did sometimes sentimentalize violence in unforgivable ways. And he was, of course, notorious for a single act: he stabbed his second wife with a pen knife. I do not think he forgave himself for it. But he didn’t run away from the subject of violence, either. No great American writer can. See, most of all, "The Executioner’s Song". The boy from Brooklyn took a great imaginative leap into the head and the heart of a murderer from the American West. And Mailer — whose prose, I would argue, was typically as distinct, complex, muscular (and sometimes indulgent) as the prose of Faulkner or James — instinctively knew to tame his expansive style this one time and stay out of the way of the life story of death-row inmate Gary Gilmore.
I do not think "The Executioner’s Song" is Mailer’s finest work, though many who lack sympathy for the complete oeuvre make that claim, thereby insidiously slighting the more characteristic, the more Maileresque writing. Yet "The Executioner’s Song" was a remarkable feat: Mailer seemed entirely at home writing about the Texas-born career criminal. Mailer said that being in the Army — and the War — was one of the best things to have happened to him. It helped make him as a writer. Rather than ignore the tough Southern types he hadn’t encountered in Brooklyn or Harvard Yard, Mailer resolved to comprehend these very American roughnecks, to bring their voices into his work.
Despite his fabled, self-conscious narcissism and his hefty ego, Mailer was in some ways not a conventionally autobiographical novelist, though he was certainly an autobiographical journalist. In "The Armies of the Night", that great work of non-fiction that holds up to repeated readings, Mailer pretty much invented contemporary autobiographical journalism, giving license to many imitators who couldn’t begin to pull it off themselves. Though he put himself at the center of "Armies of the Night" and his many other pieces of very eccentric journalism, Mailer held true to his offhand remark that he’d never write a novel about his mother. He didn’t have that sort of autobiographical impulse. His novels were not complaints. Better to boast than complain, he seemed to think — and in retrospect, there’s something winning about the attitude.
At the time that Harlot’s Ghost was published in l991, I remember thinking: Too bad, Norman spent all that time on a novel about the CIA but now, in our peaceful age, the CIA is irrelevant to American life, an outdated vestige of the Cold War. Of course, I was wrong back then and Mailer was right. The CIA is today central to any understanding of the intricacies of America’s elites, American capitalism, and this country’s capacity for brutality. Even Martin Amis, no fan of Mailer’s work, counts "Harlot’s Ghost" as an underrated work. And it stands up to Mailer’s own ambitions for the novel as expressed in "The Big Empty": “The honor, the value of a serious novel rests on the assumption that the explanations our culture has given us on profound matters are not profound. Working on a novel, one feels oneself getting closer to new questions, better ones, questions that are harder to answer.”
It says something about our time that it was surprising to hear Mailer, in the midst of his ninth decade, recently lecture a New York audience about the importance of courage. In his useful book about writing, The Spooky Art, Mailer argued that a novelist’s character is revealed in his work: the novelist sees his strengths and weaknesses in the pages of his novels. And for Mailer, make no mistake about it, writing a novel required courage and exposed its opposite. This is a sobering revelation for a novelist such as myself, but I must say that Mailer was correct. And reading Mailer’s work, you see just how courageous he was: courageous enough to capture the fierceness, wit, and narcissism of the most famous African-American athlete of our time in The Fight; courageous enough to take on the CIA in Harlot’s Ghost; courageous enough to imagine the early life of Hitler in The Castle in the Forest; and courageous enough to speculate about the Almighty in his final work, On God: An Uncommon Conversation. No, Mailer was not afraid to make a fool of himself. And yes, Mailer’s version of Hitler, God, and the Devil all bore a certain resemblance to Mailer himself. But as Mailer’s almost-contemporary Saul Bellow once put it, no one ever criticized Van Gogh for painting so many self-portraits.
A quick pass through Google Images reveals a whiff of the large anger Mailer famously displayed on TV in his chilling encounter with Gore Vidal on “The Dick Cavett Show” years ago. Yet Mailer in recent decades seemed to be the embodiment his own observation of Henry Miller: because Miller had so fully expressed his most his demonic side, Mailer suggested, Miller earned a benevolent, almost saintly old age.
From sitting in the audience of Mailer’s many public appearances, I remember the Irish sparkle in his bright blue Jewish eyes; the pugilistic roll of his shoulders as he prepared to answer a question or counter a critic; and the odd lilt of his Boston-Brooklyn speaking voice, the curious accent he invented for himself in another great existential leap. I will miss Mailer’s brilliant, pugnacious, spontaneous, ironic public self. For me — and no doubt for countless other American readers and writers — the death of Norman Mailer means the loss of a great, difficult, dangerous, hugely ambitious, idealized father.
— Guest Butler Ronald Fried, author of Christmas in Paris, 2002, knows even more about Balzac than he does about Norman Mailer.
